The Death of the Heart (6 page)

Thomas liked from the first her smiling, offhand melancholy, her good head, her good nature, an energy he detected under her indolence. Though ash blonde she had, in some way, the personality more of a dark woman. She was, in fact, the first blonde woman who had attracted Thomas: for one thing, he had always detested pinkness, but Anna had an opaque magnolia skin. Her well-built not very slender body moved with deliberation, well in her control. He was affected by the smoothness and unity of her manner, which just was not hard. Her clothes, as part of her style, also pleased and affected him.

Before they met, his few loves had been married women, and the suspicion, later the certainty, that Anna had already had a lover only made her seem kinder, less far from himself. He did not do well with young girls; he was put off by their candid expectancy. He dreaded (to be exact, he dreaded at that time) to be loved with any great gush of the heart. There was some nerve in his feeling he did not want touched: he protected it without knowing where it was. Already, when he met Anna, he had been thinking of marriage; his means would by now allow it; he did not like the stresses of an affair. Back in London from Dorset, he and Anna met often, alone or at the houses of mutual friends: they dropped into an idiom of sentimental teasing or of intimate sharpness with one another. When they agreed to marry Thomas was happy enough, and Anna perfectly willing. Then they married: Thomas discovered himself the prey of a passion for her, inside marriage, that nothing in their language could be allowed to express, that nothing could satisfy.

Using capital transferred to him by his mother, Thomas had bought himself into, and now controlled 
with his partner, an advertising agency: Quayne and Merrett. The business did very well. Anything opportunist or flashy about the venture (of which old Mrs. Quayne had not liked the idea, at first) was discounted by Thomas’s solid, sub-imperial presence at his official desk. He got back the confidence of his father’s associates—this business with no past soon took on, for the old men, an almost dusty prestige. Flair might be suspect, but they saluted ability: Thomas was a chip of better quality than the old block had been. Quayne and Merrett held their ground, then got more ground; Thomas showed weight, his partner, Merrett, acumen. The vivacious young men they needed were recruited by Merrett. From the business, and from interest on the residue of his mother’s capital, Thomas derived, at present, an income of about two thousand five hundred a year. Anna, upon the death of her father, had succeeded to five hundred a year.

The Quaynes had expected to have two or three children: in the early years of their marriage Anna had two miscarriages. These exposures to false hopes, then to her friends’ pity, had turned her back on herself: she did not want children now. She pursued what had been her interests before marriage in a leisurely, rather defended way. As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world. He turned his face away from it, in on Anna. Now he was thirty-six, he could think of nothing with which he could have wished to endow a child.

When his father died, and then finally when Irene died, Thomas had felt himself disembarrassed. His mother had made a point of keeping Mr. Quayne’s photographs where they had always been, all over the Dorset house, as though the old gentleman were no more than away on some rather silly holiday. She spoke constantly, naturally, of “Your father.” When
she
died, he discontinued his visits to the couple abroad, telling himself (and no doubt rightly) that these visits were not less embarrassing to Mr. Quayne and Irene than they were to him. In those sunless hotel rooms, those chilly flats, his father’s disintegration, his laugh so anxious or sheepish, his uneasiness with Irene in Thomas’s presence, had filled Thomas with an obscure shame—on behalf of his father, himself and society. From the grotesqueries of that marriage he had felt a revulsion. Portia, with her suggestion—during those visits—of scared lurking, had stared at him like a kitten that expects to be drowned. Unavowed relief at the snuffing-out of two ignominious people, who had caused so much chagrin, who seemed to have lived with so little pleasure, had gone far to make Thomas accord with his father’s wish. It was fair, it was only proper (he said when the letter came) that Portia should come to London. With obsessed firmness, he had stood out against Anna’s objections. “For one year,” he said.
“He
only said for a year.”

So they had done what was proper. Matchett, when she was told, said: “We could hardly do less, madam. Mrs. Quayne would have felt it was only right.”

Matchett had helped Anna get ready Portia’s room—a room with a high barred window, that could have been the nursery. Standing up to look out of the window, you saw the park, with its map of lawns and walks, the narrow part of the lake, the diagonal iron bridge. From the bed—Anna tried for a moment with her head on the pillow—you saw, as though in the country, nothing but tops of trees. Anna had, at this moment before they met, the closest feeling for Portia she ever had. Later, she stood on a chair to re-set the cuckoo clock that had been hers as a child. She had new sprigged curtains made, but did not re-paper the room—Portia would only be in it for a year. Stuff from the two cupboards (which had made useful store-places) was moved to the boxroom; and Matchett, who was as strong as a nigger, carried the little desk from another floor. Anna, fitting a pleated shade on the bed lamp, could not help remarking: “This would please Mrs. Quayne.”

Matchett let this pass with no comment of any kind: she was kneeling, tacking a valance round the bed. She never took up a remark made into the air—thus barring herself against those offhand, meaning approaches from which other people hope so much. She gave, in return for hire, her discretion and her unstinted energy, but made none of those small concessions to whim or self-admiration that servants are unadmittedly paid to make. There were moments when this correctness, behind her apron, cut both ways: she only was not hostile from allowing herself no feeling at all. Having done the valance she got up and, with a creak of her poplin dress at the armpits, reached up and hung a wreathed Dresden mirror Anna had got from somewhere on a nail above a stain on the wall. This was not where Anna meant the mirror to hang—when Matchett’s back was turned she unostentatiously moved it. But Matchett’s having for once exceeded her duties put Anna less in the wrong. When the room was ready, it looked (as she told St. Quentin) very pretty indeed: it ought to be dear to Portia after endless hotels. There was something homely, even, about the faded paper—and also they added, at the last minute, a white rug by the bed, for the girl’s bare feet. If Anna had fought against Portia’s coming, she knew how to give her defeat style… .Portia arrived as black as a little crow, in heavy Swiss mourning chosen by her aunt—back from the East in time to take charge of things. Anna explained at once that mourning not only did not bring the dead back but did nobody good. She got a cheque from Thomas, took Portia shopping round London and bought her frocks, hats, coats, blue, grey, red, jaunty and trim. Matchett, unpacking these when they came home, said: “You have put her in colours, madam?”

“She need not look like an orphan: it’s bad for her.”

Matchett only folded her lips.

“Well, what, Matchett?” Anna said touchily.

“Young people like to wear what is usual.”

Anna had been askance. The forecast shadow of Portia, even, had started altering things—that incident of the mirror had marked an unheard-of tendency in Matchett, to put in her own oar. She said, more defensively than she intended to: “I’ve got her a dead white evening dress, and a black velvet one.”

“Oh, then Miss Portia is to dine downstairs?”

“Surely. She’s got to learn to. Besides, where else could she eat?”

Matchett’s ideas must date from the family house, where the young ladies, with bows on flowing horsetails of hair, supped upstairs with their governess, making toast, telling stories, telling each other’s fortunes with apple peel. In the home of today there is no place for the miss: she has got to sink or swim. But Matchett, upstairs and down with her solid impassive tread, did not recognise that some tracts no longer exist. She seemed, instead, to detect some lack of life in the house, some organic failure in its propriety. Lack in the Quaynes’ life ot family custom seemed not only to disorientate Matchett but to rouse her contempt—family custom, partly kind, partly cruel, that has long been rationalised away. In this airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken. The rooms were set for strangers’ intimacy, or else for exhausted solitary retreat.

The Marx Brothers, that evening at the Empire, had no success with Portia. The screen threw its tricky light on her unrelaxed profile: she sat almost appalled. Anna took her eyes from the screen to complain once or twice to Thomas: “She doesn’t think this is funny.” Thomas, who had been giving unwilling snorts, relapsed into gloom, and said: “Well, they are a lowering lot.” Anna leaned across him: “You liked Sandy Macpherson, didn’t you, Portia?—Thomas, do kick her and ask if she liked Sandy Macpherson?” The organist still loudly and firmly playing had gone down with his organ, through floodlit mimosa, into a bottomless pit, from which
Parle Moi d’Amour
kept on faintly coming up till someone down there shut a lid on him. Portia had no right to say that people were less brave now… .Now the Marx Brothers were over, the three Quaynes dived for their belongings and filed silently out—they missed the News in order to miss the Rush.

Anna and Portia, glum for opposing reasons, waited in the foyer while Thomas went for a taxi. For those minutes, in the mirror-refracted glare, they looked like workers with tomorrow ahead. Then someone looked hard at Anna, looked back, looked again, registered indecision, raised his hat and returned, extending a large anxious delighted hand. “Miss
Fellowes!
”

“Major Bruttl How extraordinary this is!”

“To think of my running into
you.
It’s extraordinary!”

“Especially as I am not even Miss Fellowes, now—I mean, I am Mrs. Quayne.”

“Do excuse me—”

“How could you possibly know? … I’m so glad we’ve met again.”

“It must be nine years plus. What a great evening we had—you and Pidgeon and I—” He stopped quickly: a look of doubt came into his eyes.

Portia stood by, meanwhile. “You must meet my sister-in-law,” said Anna at once: “Major Brutt—Miss Quayne.” She went on, not with quite so much assurance: “I hope you enjoyed the Marx Brothers?”

“Well, to tell you the truth—I knew this place in the old days; I’d never heard of these chaps, but I thought I would drop in. I can’t say I—”

“Oh, you find them lowering, too?”

“I daresay they’re up to date, but they’re not what I call funny.”

“Yes,” Anna said, “they are up to date for a bit.” Major Brutt’s eyes travelled from Anna’s smiling and talking mouth, via the camellia fastened under her chin, to the upturned brim of Portia’s hat—where it stayed. “I hope,” he said to Portia,
“you
have enjoyed yourself.” Anna said: “No, I don’t think she did, much—Oh, look, my husband has got a taxi. Do come back with us: we must all have a drink… . Oh, Thomas, this is Major Brutt.” …As they walked out two-and-two to the taxi, Anna said to Thomas out of the side of her mouth: “Friend of Pidgeon’s—we once had an evening with him.”

“Did
we? I don’t—When?”

“Not you and I, silly: I and Pidgeon. Years ago. But he really must have a drink.”

“Naturally,” said Thomas. Putting on no expression, he steered her by one elbow through the crowd at the door—for whenever you come out, you never avoid the Rush. In the taxi, infected by Major Brutt, Thomas sat bolt upright, looking hard at everything through the window in a military way. Whereas, Major Brutt, beside him, kept glancing most timidly at the ladies’ faces flowering on fur collars in the dark of the cab. He remarked once or twice: “I must say, this is an amazing coincidence.” Portia sat twisted sideways, so that her knees should not annoy Thomas. Oh, the charm of this accident, this meeting in a sumptuous place—this was one of those polished encounters she and Irene spied on when they had peeped into a Palace Hotel. As the taxi crawled into Windsor Terrace, she exclaimed, all lit up: “Oh, thank you for taking me!”

Thomas only said: “Pity you didn’t like it.”

“Oh, but I did like being there.”

Major Brutt said firmly: “Those four chaps were a blot—This where we stop? Good.”

“Yes, we stop here,” Anna said, resignedly getting out.

The afternoon mist had frozen away to nothing: their house, footlit by terrace lamps, ran its pilasters up into glassy black night air. Portia shivered all down and put up her hands to her collar; Major Brutt’s smart clatter struck a ring from the pavement; he slapped his coat, saying: “Freezing like billy-o.”

“We can slide tomorrow,” said Thomas. “That will be jolly.” He scooped out a handful of silver, stared at it, paid the taxi and felt round for his key. As though he heard himself challenged, or heard an echo, he looked sharply over his shoulder down the terrace—empty, stagey, E-shaped, with frigid pillars cut out on black shadow: a facade with no back. “We’re wonderfully quiet up here,” he told Major Brutt.

“Really more like the country.”

“For God’s sake, let us in!” Anna exclaimed—Major Brutt looked at her with solicitude.

It was admirably hot and bright in the study—all the same, indoors the thing became too far-fetched. Major Brutt looked about unassumingly, as though he would like to say “What a nice place you’ve got here,” but was not sure if he knew them well enough. Anna switched lamps on and off with a strung-up air, while Thomas, having said: “Scotch, Irish or brandy?” filled up the glasses on the tray. Anna could not speak—she thought of her closed years: seeing Robert Pidgeon, now, as a big fly in the amber of this decent man’s memory. Her own memory was all blurs and seams. She started dreading the voice in which she could only say: “Do you hear anything of him? How much do you see him, these days?” Or else, “Where is he now, do you know?” Magnetism to that long-ago evening—on which Robert and she must have been perfect lovers—had made her bring back this man, this born third, to her home. Now Thomas, by removing himself to a different plane, made her feel she had done a thoroughly awkward thing. The pause was too long: it smote her to see Major Brutt look, uncertain, into his whisky, clearly feeling ought he not, then, to drink this? Ought he not to be here?